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For instance, if estimating the effect of a drug on blood pressure with a 95% confidence interval that is six units wide, and the known standard deviation of blood pressure in the population is 15, the required sample size would be =, which would be rounded up to 97, since sample sizes must be integers and must meet or exceed the calculated ...
The confidence interval can be expressed in terms of probability with respect to a single theoretical (yet to be realized) sample: "There is a 95% probability that the 95% confidence interval calculated from a given future sample will cover the true value of the population parameter."
when the probability distribution is unknown, Chebyshev's or the Vysochanskiï–Petunin inequalities can be used to calculate a conservative confidence interval; and; as the sample size tends to infinity the central limit theorem guarantees that the sampling distribution of the mean is asymptotically normal.
In contrast, it is worth noting that other confidence interval may have coverage levels that are lower than the nominal , i.e., the normal approximation (or "standard") interval, Wilson interval, [8] Agresti–Coull interval, [13] etc., with a nominal coverage of 95% may in fact cover less than 95%, [4] even for large sample sizes.
For a confidence level, there is a corresponding confidence interval about the mean , that is, the interval [, +] within which values of should fall with probability . Precise values of z γ {\displaystyle z_{\gamma }} are given by the quantile function of the normal distribution (which the 68–95–99.7 rule approximates).
In the social sciences, a result may be considered statistically significant if its confidence level is of the order of a two-sigma effect (95%), while in particle physics and astrophysics, there is a convention of requiring statistical significance of a five-sigma effect (99.99994% confidence) to qualify as a discovery.
Given a sample from a normal distribution, whose parameters are unknown, it is possible to give prediction intervals in the frequentist sense, i.e., an interval [a, b] based on statistics of the sample such that on repeated experiments, X n+1 falls in the interval the desired percentage of the time; one may call these "predictive confidence intervals".
Comparison of the rule of three to the exact binomial one-sided confidence interval with no positive samples. In statistical analysis, the rule of three states that if a certain event did not occur in a sample with n subjects, the interval from 0 to 3/ n is a 95% confidence interval for the rate of occurrences in the population.